The global study of thousands of adults published in Sleep Health found only 15% of people slept the recommended 7-9 hours for five or more nights per week – and among those who did achieve an average of 7-9 hours per night over the nine month monitoring period, about 40% of the nights fell outside the ideal range.
“This is crucial because regularly not sleeping enough – or possibly too much – are associated with ill effects and we are only just realising the consequences of irregular sleep,” says Flinders University researcher Dr Hannah Scott.
“Clearly getting the recommended sleep duration range frequently is a challenge for many people to achieve, especially during the working week.”
The Flinders research group used sleep tracker data collected by an under-mattress sensor to examine sleep durations over the nine-month period in almost 68,000 adults worldwide.
Sleeping less than six hours on average per night is associated with increased mortality risk and multiple healthcare conditions including hypertension, obesity and heart disease. Less than 7 hours and more than 9 hours of sleep a day has been linked to adverse health and wellbeing, including digestive and neuro-behavioural deficits.
Female participants generally had longer sleep durations that males, and middle-aged people recorded shorter sleep durations than younger or older participants.
“Based on these findings, public health and advocacy efforts need to support the community and individuals to achieve more regular sleep within the recommended range for their age,” says co-author Professor Danny Eckert, an Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) leadership fellow and director of Sleep Health research at Flinders University.
“Given what we know about the importance of sleep to health, we also need to assist people to resolve chronic sleep difficulties and encourage all people to make sleep a priority.”
Regular snoring is also associated with hypertension, according to another new study from Flinders University.
The Flinders sleep researchers’ tips to achieve a better sleep regime include:
Ritchelle is a Content Producer for Healthcare Channel, Australia’s premier resource of information for healthcare.